Triple Booting Mac with OSX, Win8, Linux

The rEFIt bootloader showing options for (the large icons, from left to right) Mac OS X , Linux, and Windows. There are also other tools below the OS selection in smaller icons. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Recently, I set up a triple boot on my MacBook Air of OSX Snow Leopard, Windows 8 Preview, and Ubuntu Linux. This article will cover the basic steps.

Materials

rEFIt – This is the tool necessary to set up 3 or more boot disks on Mac. Download the Mac disk image here : http://refit.sourceforge.net/ and burn it to a disc (use disk utility on Mac or any number of options on Windows)

Ubuntu – This is my preferred desktop distro of Linux. Other distros can work. Grab the 64-bit or 32-bit ISO from here : http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop and burn to a disk

Windows 8 Preview – I wanted to give Microsoft’s latest a go. It’s going to be a good upgrade to Windows. Download the ISO here : http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/download burn to a disk and be sure to write the key on the disk

Procedure

BACKUP

If you care about the data on your Mac, back it up to another drive or a service. Simple solution on Mac is Time Machine.

SET UP rEFIt

Run the rEFIt package and Install

PARTITION and REINSTALL OSX

Boot your Mac with the OSX Install DVD

Once in OSX, select Utilities – > Drive Utility

Select your internal harddrive

Select Partition Tab

Click the + sign on the screen to create a total of 4 partitions. On my Mac, I did the following